Original Project

The "original project" is Sartre's candidate for the genuinely irreducible stratum of a person — the concrete, free unification that underlies and organizes all empirical tendencies, habits, and drives without being reducible to any of them. Against psychoanalytic reductionism (which dissolves the person into bundles of drives) and against any attempt to ground the person in indeterminate substance or abstract essence, Sartre insists that the irreducible must be richer, not more abstract, than anything derivable from it. The original project is therefore a non-substantial absolute: it has the ontological weight of an absolute (it is the ground of all particulars), but it carries no positive substance — it is not a thing, not an instinctual core, not a hidden nature. It is the for-itself's free, concrete, totalizing way of being its own lack-of-being, its characteristic manner of projecting toward being while remaining structurally unable to coincide with being.

Crucially, the original project is not a conscious choice among alternatives; it is the ontological condition that makes any particular choice intelligible at all. Because the for-itself is constituted by lack — it is what it is not, and is not what it is — freedom is not a property the subject possesses but the very mode of being of the project itself. The project and freedom are co-extensive: to be the original project is to be the concrete totality of a freedom that is always already engaged, always already thrown into a situation, and always already in the process of totalizing that situation into a unified existential meaning. This is why the project cannot be accessed by ordinary empirical biography but requires existential psychoanalysis — a hermeneutic that reads each gesture, preference, and choice as an expression of the totalizing movement of the whole.

In the source (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological), the original project is introduced at the point where Sartre must answer the question: what is the proper object of existential psychoanalysis? The concept functions as a corrective to both Freudian drive-theory (cross-ref: Drive) and to any account that grounds the person in substance. Where the Lacanian drive is a headless, partial, looping force that never achieves a natural goal, Sartre's original project is a totalizing, free unification — not a partial pressure but a concrete whole. The project is thus positioned as a phenomenological alternative to the drive's impersonal, mechanical character.

The original project also speaks directly to the cross-ref'd concepts of Lack, Freedom, and Desire. For Lacan, desire is produced by lack — the irreducible gap between need and demand — and the subject is constituted by this structural deficit. Sartre's original project maps onto this terrain obliquely: the project is the for-itself's concrete living-out of its constitutive lack-of-being (the for-itself cannot coincide with itself, and the project is the name for how it organizes this impossibility into a personal style). However, where Lacanian desire is fundamentally alienated — "the desire of man is the desire of the Other" — Sartre's project is, at least formally, owned by the for-itself as its own freedom. The concept also intersects with Fantasy in the Lacanian sense: both the original project and the fundamental fantasy ($◇a) function as invisible organizing frames that give the subject's desires their coordinates and make a coherent reality possible. Yet they diverge sharply — fantasy is a grammatical structure, a signifying arrangement produced by language's cut, while the original project is a pre-linguistic, experiential totalization. Finally, the concept brushes against Anxiety: for Sartre, anxiety is precisely the affective disclosure of the original project's freedom — the vertigo of discovering that no necessity binds the project in place — which loosely parallels the Lacanian formulation of anxiety as the encounter with the void that sustains desire.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.561)

the irreducible unification which we ought to find, which is Flaubert, and which we require biographers to reveal to us—this is the unification of an original project, a unification which should reveal itself to us as a non-substantial absolute.

The phrase "non-substantial absolute" is theoretically explosive: it claims that the most irreducible stratum of a person has the modal weight of an absolute (it grounds everything else and is itself ungrounded) while carrying zero positive substance — making it structurally analogous to the Lacanian lack, a "nothing" that nonetheless organizes a whole. The proper name "Flaubert" is equally loaded: it insists that the original project is not a universal category but a singular, irreducible individual totality, the very thing a reductive drive-account cannot preserve.